The Nowotny Machine

Ben Van Dyke

The Nowotny Machine is a collaborative filmmaking process that revels in uncertainty as its primary method for producing content. Drawn from the work of Austrian sociologist, Helga Nowotny and her book, “The Cunning of Uncertainty,” the Nowotny Machine is a deliberately absurd system of complex rules that co-participants must learn to navigate and decode. The machine appears systematic but deliberately avoids algorithmic thinking, forcing co-creators to confront ambiguity in their creative decisions. The resulting film emerges from this tension between structure and unpredictability, producing outcomes that could never be predetermined—a practical embodiment of Nowotny's thesis that uncertainty is not an obstacle to knowledge but a generative force within it.

Nowotny’s uncertainty, not to be confused with disorder, is a naturally occurring phenomenon in knowledge production that emerges when we attempt to exert control over increasingly complex systems. The project is an aesthetic intervention and critique of the human condition’s relentless pursuit of predictability. Like Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts, where scientific revolutions occur when anomalies accumulate to challenge existing frameworks, the Nowotny Machine creates conditions for strange attractors, patterns within chaotic systems that reveal underlying order, to emerge through collaborative work. The project exists in what Donna Haraway might call a “boundary zone,” a space of cyborg entanglement between human intention, technological mediation, and environmental contingency that resist singular authorship and destabilize our anthropocentric desire for mastery.

The Nowotny Machine is engineered to function like John Cage’s chance operations or Yoko Ono’s instruction pieces. Like Cage and Ono, mathematical patterns are an important part of the equation to simultaneously produce formulaic and unpredictable results. For example, Edward Lorenz’s research in weather patterns that led to our understanding of the “butterfly effect” shares the same systemic behavior of the Nowotny Machine — both systems are incredibly sensitive to the initial conditions of observation. Like the flutter of a butterfly’s wing cascades into a hurricane, the smallest creative gestures ripple through the system, fundamentally altering how the moving images materialize.

This collaborative project was developed at DesignInquiry’s gathering in Amsterdam, bringing together a diverse group of artists and designers to explore the theme of “Salvage.” Both salvage and uncertainty are processes that are only visible in specific actions or moments of an object (or person’s) life-cycle. In acknowledging the virtues of salvage and uncertainty, the same ethos emerges — a transformative relationship with people and our built environment that celebrates the missing and unforeseen. This practice strengthens our resilience against the compulsive desire for certainty and control — the virus that plagues the social imaginary. According to DesignInquiry’s Peter Hall, “Salvage, translated to ‘bergen’ in Dutch, denotes a discovery of hidden value in something dredged up from the deep, something thought to be beyond repair.” Indeed, cultivating an awareness of our surroundings exposes a complex language of materials and experiences that promote deeper learning. Uncertainty, translated to “onzekerheid” in Dutch, denotes a similar discovery of hidden value in a slightly different context. In moments of salvage, there is an intentional decision to engage and rediscover. In contrast, uncertainty will certainly find you regardless of your intention to control your environment. Both lines of thinking put extraordinary pressure on capitalism to acknowledge the nihilism at its core — the perpetual need to mitigate the consequences of the failing infrastructure we insisted on building; the dopamine hit we get from novelty is found in manufactured newness instead of the reinterpreted and rediscovered. Salvage and uncertainty share the same promise — it could be otherwise.

The process unfolds in three distinct phases. First, participants work in groups of three, following prompts from the Nowotny Machine to capture ten-second video clips throughout Amsterdam. These prompts are intentionally ambiguous, allowing for creative interpretation. After uploading their clips to a shared folder, participants enter the second phase. Here, they select another group’s footage and incorporate it into their own work while following the same prompts, creating a 20-second clip. In the third phase, this process repeats once more, resulting in a final 40-second video. Throughout this progression, each new iteration builds upon previous material through physical re-recording rather than traditional digital editing software.

Editing through re-recording rather than digital manipulation is perhaps the project’s most radical constraint. It recalls Joan Jonas’s “Vertical Roll” (1972), where the desynchronization between video signal and monitor created a constantly rolling image that disrupted a traditional viewing and stresses the mind. But it also speaks to broader concerns about digital mediation and/or algorithmic editing. By asking participants to physically re-record video by pointing one phone at another, filming a projection on a wall, or recording a screen through water or glass, the process introduces visual artifacts and degradations highlighting the materiality of the image-making process.

This method is similar to what Hito Steyerl calls “poor images” which are images that have been compressed, reproduced, and circulated until they bear the marks of their journey. But rather than seeing this degradation as loss, it serves as evidence of authenticity. Similarly, the imperfection generated by the Nowotny Machine signals the language of salvage and reinterpretation. Each generation of copying introduces new possibilities, new accidents that couldn’t be planned.

Audio is extracted from ambient recordings from the DesignInquiry gathering itself, creating a parallel archive of material that exists independently from the visual content. At the Graphische Werkplaats Amsterdam, radio frequencies were collected as they came into contact with letterpress machines, shipping containers, and nearby trees. In addition to more traditional audio collected from discussions and lectures from the DesignInquiry gathering, the collection of sound bites were kept separate until it was time to edit.

The editing phase employs an entirely different series of prompts designed to force the editor to make decisions about sound-image relationships based on structural patterns rather than aesthetic preferences. This deliberately removes editorial decisions based on personal style, ensuring that the final work emerges from the tension between constraint and chance rather than singular artistic vision.

The final film is always an unknown quantity (or quality) crafted by the machine with evidence of its participants scattered about — degraded, unpredictable, and impossible to replicate. It’s a testament to what is possible when we relinquish control and allow ourselves to be guided by the cunning of uncertainty. This project is evidence that the most compelling intellectual territories lie in the productive absence of certainty.